GATE's chairman and CEO, Mr. Glenn Jones, has said that "Education is the great hope for the survival of humankind and for the forward progress of civilization." The French revolutionary Danton said more than two centuries ago, "After bread, education." Education is the most basic necessity after those that are vital to life itself--food, clothing, and shelter. It is education that lifts people out of the state of chronic poverty in which they are constantly struggling to fulfill basic needs such as these. The truth is that all people have a right to have these basic needs fulfilled, and they also have a right to education. In this regard, the world is not doing very well.
More than 836 million adults in the developing world are illiterate, according to surveys by UNESCO. Around the world, one of every eight children is not enrolled in primary school, and more than one third of adolescents are not in high school. It is no coincidence that the vast majority of these unschooled youngsters and illiterate adults can be found in the poorest countries on earth. The direct link between poverty and lack of educational opportunities has been demonstrated many times over. As Lyndon Johnson said during the War on Poverty in the 1960s, "Poverty has many roots, but the tap root is ignorance."
While everyone has a contribution to make in furthering our educational progress, basic education is a fundamental right, and it is the responsibility of governments to provide it. The huge gaps in opportunity that we witness in our world are just one form of injustice, and states are bound by duty and by law to strive for justice. Quite simply, we are not investing enough in education. I am more familiar with the situation in Latin America than in other areas of the world, and I can tell you that in many of our countries, we are condemning our children to be poor laborers, just as their grandparents were. Instead of preparing them for the twenty-first century, we are sending them back to the nineteenth century. We can do much better than this.
I have recently proposed that the next government of Costa Rica set and reach the goal of having universal education through the age of seventeen by the year 2006. In order to do this, we will have to increase the share of our budget that goes to education. According to Costa Rica's constitution, we should be spending 6% of our gross domestic product each year on public education. It is not happening. The actual figure is just below five percent, and the reason is that we do not have our fiscal house in order. For Costa Rica to be able to comply with the mandates of its own constitution, and in a broader sense, for all societies to fulfill their obligations to their poorest citizens, we must begin by instituting responsible macroeconomic policies, eliminating the fiscal deficit, reducing the public debt, and creating the conditions for greater economic growth. Only if we strike the proper economic balances will we be able to alleviate poverty. These adjustments are vital for the well-being of the whole society. Our children deserve no less from their leaders.
Many leaders of poor countries will tell you that the cost of providing decent educational opportunities is prohibitive. Saddled with debt, lacking infrastructure, and short of trained personnel, many nations in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and elsewhere simply cannot afford to provide basic schooling for all of their children. However, this is not a problem of lack of resources, but rather a problem of resource allocation, both within developing countries and on the part of the wealthier countries. The United Nations estimates that it would only take an additional six billion dollars per year to make basic educational opportunities available to the entire population of the developing world. To put that figure into perspective, consider that Americans spend 8 billion dollars per year on cosmetics, and Europeans spend 11 billion dollars annually on ice cream. Or consider the fact the world spends 780 billion dollars per year on weapons and soldiers. Obviously, the resources necessary to provide educational services exist; it is just a matter of changing our priorities and redirecting them so that they benefit the needy children of the world.
Making this happen will require a serious commitment on the part of poor and rich countries alike. In the developing world, those leaders who complain for lack of resources must begin by checking their arms procurement budgets. I want to quote my good friend, the late Mahbub ul-Haq, who was a pioneer of the human development school of thought. In his book on human development, he notes: "Sometime back, Tanzania's president Julius Nyerere asked in legitimate despair, 'must we starve our children to pay our debts?' It is at least as pertinent to ask, must we starve our children to increase our defense expenditure? . . . When our children cry for milk in the middle of the night, shall we give them guns instead?" I believe that every leader of a developing country must re-examine the priorities of their national budget and redirect resources from the military to the fulfillment of basic human needs.
In many countries, however, this will still not be enough. The wealthy countries, too, have a commitment to make when it comes to educating the world's poor. Our societies are too closely linked, by modern communications as well as by historical relationships, for the industrialized countries to exonerate themselves from some part of the responsibility for giving poor countries a hand into the twenty-first century. That helping hand must take two primary forms: debt forgiveness and increased foreign aid. Debt forgiveness for the poorest countries has begun, but it must urgently be expanded. Foreign aid in real terms has actually shrunk over the past twenty years, and the United States has led the charge away from humanitarian and foreign aid, even as its economy has grown to unprecedented levels.
When we speak of the global economy and the developing world, I think it is important that we recognize the danger in the emphasis we place today on competitiveness. We have created numerous indices of competitiveness that show us which countries or regions offer the greatest incentives for investment, and where the profit margins are the highest. While competition may create efficient economies, efficiency alone is not enough. Compassion and solidarity are necessary to temper the competition of our open economies, so that those who are unable to compete are not left out altogether. To the rural farmer that lacks roads on which to bring his produce to market, to the child who works instead of learning to read and write, to the young adult for whom a university education is only a fantasy, competitiveness means only one thing: losing.
What is needed today is a new Marshall plan for the world’s poor. In 1947 the United States pledged up to twenty billion dollars to re-build Europe after the war, and the investment proved extremely profitable. What would it take to get governments—not only that of the U.S., but all of the well-off industrialized nations—to commit to a similar plan today, in order to re-build the world’s poorest countries, which have been devastated by centuries of colonialism, natural disasters, armed conflicts and poor governance? I propose that a group of countries such as the O.E.C.D. or the G-7 plus some others, re-direct a small percentage of their defense spending for the defense of the world’s poor. We know that redirecting just 5% of what the world spends on weapons and soldiers over ten years would be sufficient to guarantee basic education, health care and nutrition, potable water, and sanitation to all of the world’s people. If we focused only on funding a mandatory minimum of nine years of education in every country, that percentage would be even less. How quickly the great powers muster the political and financial will to bail out failing economies, but how slow we have been to act to stamp out illiteracy, disease, and hunger. As I mentioned before, the resources are there, what is lacking is the vision and the sense of solidarity.
If we were to make such an investment in education, it would reap great returns in the quality of our democracies. The most prominent of democracies, the United States, has produced several great statesmen who have recognized the importance of education for democracy. John Adams, one of the founding fathers, noted that "Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people," and John F. Kennedy echoed that sentiment in the twentieth century when he said, "Liberty without learning is always in peril, and learning without liberty is always in vain." The connection was perhaps best summed up by political commentator Walter Lippman, who had this to say: "No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people."
These lessons can be well applied in Latin America and many other areas of the world where democracy is still a relatively new experiment. The movement away from dictatorships and repression in developing countries has been progressing steadily, but the institutions of democratic governance remain fragile in many societies. Despite all of the progress in democratization that has been made over the past twenty years in places like Poland, the Philippines, Nigeria, Haiti, Chile and Nicaragua, this democracy will not be complete--and it will not be secure--until illiteracy has been eradicated and education is available to all.
Education is not only essential to the creation of democracies, it is essential to development, and in particular to what we today call "sustainable development." Sustainable development implies a balance between meeting immediate needs and looking to the future with a long-term vision. Everyone knows by now that the hierarchy of human needs dictates that someone who is hungry and has a family to feed is not going to think of protecting the environment first. Because of this, much environmental destruction has been caused by the subsistence farming of poor families throughout the developing world. To reverse this phenomenon, concerted efforts to meet the basic needs of poor families, as well as strong programs of education that are capable of instilling a long-term vision and teaching the responsible use of resources, will be indispensable.
When speaking of development, it is important to underscore the active and essential role of women in these processes. It is not a coincidence that the countries with the highest levels of human development also come the closest to offering equal opportunity and gender equity in their societies. Perhaps no society has yet reached the fullness of equality that most of us hold as an ideal, because though we speak about the importance of equal opportunities for women and men, we continue to commit the same errors: we exclude women from positions of power, give them no voice in community decisions, and cling to stereotypes and prejudices so deeply ingrained in us that we do not even realize we have them.
The Arias Foundation’s Center for Human Progress is working to change this state of affairs in Central America. The Center has several projects that are aimed at studying rural women’s access to such resources as land, training, work, and credit, and to advocate for women’s rights to these resources where they are being denied. The Center also works with development organizations to incorporate a gender focus in development projects and to try to ensure that women hold some of the decision-making power in these projects. My friends, if we want to advance the health, education, and livelihoods of our poorest communities, we will never succeed by leaving half of the community out of the process. In fact, even more than half of the picture would be missing. There is a saying that if you educate a man, you educate a man, but if you educate a woman, you educate a family. It is time for all policies, but perhaps development policy in particular, to take into account the role of women and families.
In the context of world population growth, too, it is easy to perceive the importance of educating women. Many studies have shown that the most rapid and effective way to slow population growth in the developing world is through the education of girls and women. If the world's governments and international organizations took this evidence to heart and acted upon it, the global population level would surely stabilize sooner than it will if we continue on our present course. Just as importantly, the world would be making a commitment to fundamental justice and to the dignity of all human beings.
My friends, as we build literacy from the ground up among the poorest and the most disenfranchised, we should not be prevented from reaching for the stars at the same time. During my presidency I was able to bring computers into some of our schools here in Costa Rica. The machines had been donated by American corporations, and represented the gift of technology which was so sorely needed in our country, and continues to be needed, to be sure. At the same time, Costa Rica still has many rural schools where a single teacher imparts lessons to all grade levels. We must make a significant investment in changing that situation, but we must also continue to press forward at the limits of modern technology and science. While we walk in the company of the poor on the road to better opportunities, we must also continue to take to the skies in pursuit of a brighter future.
The work of GATE is an example of this. Your distance learning programs grew out of the needs of the corporate sector for well-trained workers in every corner of the globe. The focus of this conference will be on how to use the technologies and standards advanced by GATE to contribute to sustainable development, and I commend you for this highly. As I mentioned, education is certainly key to processes of sustainable development, and being able to deliver training and technical assistance easily over long distances will expedite the processes immensely.
At the same time, I wish to praise your work among the upper levels of the economy. For at the same time that we work to advance the opportunities of the poorest, we must continue to push the boundaries of what is possible to all of us. Your work does this by facilitating the sharing of knowledge and building of capacity in companies around the world. You are helping the developing world not only at the most basic levels of development, but also through spreading the benefits of distance learning in those sectors of our societies that are more advanced, thereby helping our corporations to mature and supporting economic growth in our countries.
